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From games-on-demand company Extent, there comes a new distribution platform called GameTanium, the first unlimited subscription gaming offering on Android. With GameTanium, users can play all the games from participating developers for just $4.99 per month. By year-end, Extent says that there will be over 200 games on its network.

The stereotypical video game player: he is young (under 20) and male; he plays for hours on his console, all from his parents' basement. But that stereotype is becoming increasingly difficult to justify as study after study has shown that gaming population to be comprised of a very different demographic.

Indeed, video gameplay is not restricted to one age group or gender. Rather, game playing is ubiquitous, with 72% of households in America saying that they play some form. Just 18% of gamers are under age 18, while 53% are between the ages of 18 and 49. That means almost a full third - 29% - of gamers are over 50. The gaming population is skewed slightly more male than female: 58% to 42%. But it's important to note that women over age 18 represent a significantly greater proportion of this population (37%) than do boys age 17 or younger (13%).

Looking at these statistics, it's clear that the explosive growth of mobile and casual gaming has challenged what's long been seen as the traditional gaming market. Sales of game software is declining, but social gaming is booming.

So has the industry adjusted to account for gamers that don't fit that old stereotype?

App monetization and distribution service provider Tapjoy has just announced the launch of a $5 million fund to help iOS developers port their existing applications to Android. The news comes on the heels of Apple's policy change, which affected all apps that used Tapjoy's pay-per-install advertisements. Apple's decision, said Tapjoy at the time, "is destroying the user experience and threatening the entire freemium model."

Now, the company has a workaround: move to Android.

This week, game network WildTanget announced it will soon be testing out a subscription game rental service on T-Mobile's Android phones and tablets. Instead purchasing a game to keep, users will be offered the opportunity to rent a game for the day, for as little as 25 cents. If they end up liking the game and decide to buy, they'll be able to apply the rental fee towards the full purchase price of the mobile application.

Will this encourage Android's notoriously penny-pinching users to open up their wallets? Or is a mistake to think that pricing alone is what's keeping Android users from buying apps in large numbers? Let us know what you think in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Qualcomm has announced the introduction of the "Snapdragon Game Pack," a collection of over 100 mobile games optimized for Snapdragon-based devices and its embedded Adreno GPUs. The goal of the new release is to highlight the advanced graphics capabilities of Qualcomm chipsets, and the mobile gaming experience they enable. It will also be made available to OEMs and operators for pre-installation on forthcoming mobile devices, the company reports.

Although it's getting a lot easier to build your own video games, many of the tools out there for doing so require you have a background in programming. Not so with with Stencyl, a new game creation studio that launches today.

"Our goal is to build the ultimate game creation experience, one that democratizes the game creation process by eliminating all technical barriers, leaving one's imagination as the limiting factor," says Stencyl co-founder Jonathan Chung.

Mobile gaming continues to be on a tear, and no surprise, it's the biggest single app category in Apple's App Store, accounting for half the downloads of both free and paid apps. According to research data leased by Distimo and Newzoo, during the month of March, more than 5 million games were downloaded by users in the US and six European countries per day.

According to the survey data, these 63 million iOS gamers downloaded an average of 2.5 games per month. The percentage of iPhone owners who play iOS game is between 50 and 75%, and based on the number of gamers playing on iOS devices, it looks as though the iPad alone has started to unseat those devices particularly aimed at gaming, such as the Playstation Portable.

Since Seth Priebatsch's keynote at this year's SXSW, excitement about adding a "game layer" to the world - liberating games from their traditional place on a computer screen and imposing game-like, social and situational constraints onto the real world (largely through mobile apps) - has positively erupted. There's been considerable interest from businesses across industries, educators, social innovators and techies alike.

Latitude Research (which partnered with ReadWriteWeb last year on a study about kids and future Web technology) has launched a new study on The Future of Gaming - they want to hear fresh perspectives from both game enthusiasts and non-gamers. What do you think the role of games will (or should) be in the future? Can they motivate and inspire people to reach personal or societal goals? Can they bring together online and offline experiences in meaningful ways?

Boosting STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education has become a priority for the government, for schools, and for tech companies. In emphasizing the importance of doing so, many point to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor that note that while there will be more than 2 million job openings in STEM-related fields by 2014, fewer than 15% of U.S. college undergraduates now pursue degrees in science or engineering.

It isn't enough to convince college students to major in science - or rather, by the time students hit college, it may be too late to pique their interest in the field. So many STEM efforts are aimed at encouraging the scientific and technical minds of younger students.

One way to ignite that interest is to give kids the skills so they can build and play their own video games. That's the idea behind Microsoft's Kodu, a visual programming language and game development tool. A product of Microsoft FUSE Labs, Kodu Game Lab enables children as young as five to design, build, and play their own games on the PC and Xbox.

The last 10 years have been called the era of Web 2.0, a term used to describe a new type of online experience, wherein a user could be both author and audience. That decade, said SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch today in his opening keynote at the SXSW conference, was the decade of social. 

That decade, however, has been won, said Priebatsch. Facebook has come away as the clear leader and now, a new decade is upon us - the decade of games. These are not children's games, however. These are games that could change the world.